As part of our celebration of all things horror in the month of October, we’re having some of our favorite filmmakers, writers, bloggers, and so on write guest blogs for us all month talking about their favorite things in the world of horror and/or Halloween.
Today’s excellent entry comes from French filmmaker, Theo Zenou, a very good friend of ours. Theo is the young filmmaker behind the terrific short film, Braintwister (read our review here), and he really knows movies. Check out what Mr. Zenou had to say!
As soon as I read Chris Coffel’s e-mail, asking me to take part in a Dark of the Matinee Halloween special, I felt both great enthusiasm and surprising dread. Let me explain.
This was an opportunity for me to talk about one of my favorite genres, and do so from a personal perspective. But I had to limit myself to five picks. The selection process was genuinely enlightening because it forces one to ponder all that is taken for granted about horror. What is horror, truly? Are Peeping Tom and Psycho horror movies or thrillers, or else, has the slasher become its own genre? Would Alien be considered a sci-fi film with a monster element, or a horror film with a sci-fi concept? Could Shutter Island – one of my all-time favorite films – and its noir-gothic be linked to horror? Genres are truly inter-permeable, and with the greats - from Hitchcock to Carpenter, Tourneur to Abrams – pinning it down to a single genre is almost impossible, because their pictures are the best that Genre has to offer, meaning transcend itself, to remain forever imprinted in our common memories.
Therefore, for this column, I focused my picks on my favorite (not the ones I consider the “best”) pictures that deal with subject matters (monsters, ghosts, revenge…) usually associated with the horror genre.
5. Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard, 2012)
It might be a little fresh to include it, but I do it anyway, because through Cabin live so many horror films that are dear to me: John Carpenter’s The Thing and Halloween, Scream, the Hammer films, Don Dohler’s stuff… Cabin is a truly brilliant picture, one that starts as a post-modern take on horror – encapsulating a spectacular amount of entertainment value. But as the film progresses, you understand that it’s not just about the ‘fun’ – and surprisingly, you become to care, as it evolves into powerful and breathtaking cinema. This is the first horror landmark for this new decade.
4. Les Diaboliques (Henri-George Clouzot, 1955)
The film is adapted from a novel by Boileau-Narcejac, in retrospect one of the best horror duos we ever had. They also wrote the source novel that became Vertigo and adapted Eyes without a Face. Furthermore, Hitchcock coveted the rights to Les Diaboliques, and both the novel and its subsequent adaptation by Clouzot inspired Psycho. If that doesn’t create hype for you, then I don’t know what will! But this film truly gets under your skin, and its mystery is so riveting, the power of its mise-en-scene so evocative that you won’t help but come back to it, time after time. Oh, and did I forget to say Les Diaboliques was William Friedkin’s favorite horror film?!
3. The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961)
In my mind, it has Deborah Kerr’s best performance as a governess slowly “losing her mind”, torn between the rationality of her intellect and the strangeness of her emotions. This is a master-class in mise-en-scene for horror, and if you study this picture, you will see how efficient deep focus can be. This is the only film I’ve ever watched in which I had to turn the lights on…
2. Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965)
I seem to have a taste for minimalistic pictures about beautiful blondes trapped in an interior setting, fighting their ways through the labyrinths of their own psyches: Deborah Kerr in The Innocents, and now Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion. Polanski’s foray into horror is often remembered for the magnificent Rosemary’s Baby but I will argue that Repulsion is a greater film. It’s raw and yet clinical, exciting and yet abominable. Polanski captured something very profound about human nature.
1. Night of The Demon (Jacques Tourneur, 1956) & The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999)
The reason why I include both films is because they have the same goals. Grounding the story in reality, rhythmically seeping in the supernatural, and ultimately providing an initiation to Faith and the Spiritual. Tourneur made a few other horror films, all great, and Shyamalan only made another horror picture, also brilliant. But those two might very well be their most representative use of the genre. Jacques Tourneur and M. Night Shyamalan are two master filmmakers, whose artistry goes beyond Genre and dig deep into the human condition, with a moral and spiritual integrity rarely equaled on celluloid.
-Theo Zenou
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